


Thin and Alive

by beanarie



Series: thoughts on being adopted [1]
Category: Incredible Hulk (2008), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Child Abuse, F/M, Gen, Science Bros, chosen family, emotional polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-02
Updated: 2012-08-02
Packaged: 2017-11-11 06:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/475724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beanarie/pseuds/beanarie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>And then Pepper mentions public transportation to avoid Tony pointing out that Bruce is blushing, and they talk about the T for like half an hour.</i>
</p><p> </p><p>An au in which Tony, orphaned at twelve and "adopted" by Pepper and later Rhodey, decides to pay it forward by adopting Bruce. Who's older than Tony is, but whatever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thin and Alive

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my lovely, lovely lady-friends, [LariaGwyn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/LariaGwyn), [gollumgollum](http://archiveofourown.org/users/gollumgollum/pseuds/gollumgollum), and [MrsDrJackson](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MrsDrJackson). They're so sweet about me spamming them with my Sciencebros and Pepperony _feelings_.

They kiss for the first time when they are fourteen. Pepper has just gotten in his face to scream out, " _I can't take you_." And Tony can only think this is it, he's finally pushed her too far.

That is not allowed to happen. He can't lose anyone else.

Tony pulls Pepper in with a hand to the small of her back and tastes her lips. Because that's what you do when you really like someone and you need them to know it.

Her eyes have gone wide and confused. "Tony," she whispers.

"Don't go away," he blurts out. She makes the face he hates, the one that comes after he confesses that he can't remember which flavor of jelly beans his mother hated or the color of the bathrobe she used to wear on lazy Saturday mornings. That face makes him want to hide in the garage and take engines apart until he forgets what sunshine looks like.

"What are you talking about?" she says. "Tony Stark. Did you just kiss me because you were afraid I'd _leave_ you?"

"What?" he says, raising his eyebrows. It isn't fair how she always knows everything. "Okay, crazy girl."

"Oh my God, you did." Her slender fist punches him in the shoulder. "Sincerely, what is wrong with you?"

He backs away a step. "Okay, come on now. My brain works really super well, actually. I'm a very smart person."

"Then explain why you do the wrong thing all the time, Tony."

"Not _all_ the time," he insists. "Really. Not all."

"Fine." She smiles a little as she touches his hair. "Maybe once a month you do something that isn't totally-"

He cuts her off with kiss number two.

Kisses three through nine occur by the end of the next day. Tony figures that the more often they do it, the quicker she'll forget how it got started.

~

Two years later, Tony meets Bruce at a thing, a science competition thing for college students in the Boston area. He can tell right off that there's something very wrong there, with Bruce. The older boy makes these comments, these asides-- _Hm, nuclear engineering. You know he's only in it for the low sperm count._ \--that make Tony laugh so hard whoever's at the podium has to stop and glare in his general direction. But Bruce only talks like that when no one but Tony can hear. The rest of the time he keeps his head down and essentially disappears. Tony can't imagine why someone like Bruce would choose to be invisible. He's clearly awesome.

When it's Bruce's turn to present, one of the more condescending associate profs rips a gaping hole in his findings and Bruce merely nods.

"You're absolutely right, sir. I apologize for the mistake," he says, and smiles like he's covering up a wound. "Thank you for pointing it out to me."

Tony plots an elaborate fantasy ending in Professor Big-Britches getting fired, blackballed from academia forever, and imprisoned for something disgusting. Outside of his mind, he has to settle for nudging Bruce with his elbow when he reclaims his seat and rolling his eyes. Tony is rewarded with a tiny grin.

An hour before the end of the day, a man with gray hair and Bruce's olive skin enters through the back and purses his lips at the room. Bruce doesn't smile at all from that point on, and he leaves without saying good-bye.

~

Instead of spending the whole first part of their phone conversation asking Pepper when she's coming back to Boston, Tony launches into this whole deal about Bruce.

"He sounds sad," Pepper says.

"I guess," Tony allows, tapping his fingers on the edge of his desk. Getting an actual response twigs him to the fact that he went on for ten minutes about someone she doesn't even know, and he feels silly. "So are you-"

"You want to do something about it." She isn't asking. In case he forgot, Pepper knows everything. "You want to help him."

"Well. _Yeah_. But he didn't exactly leave a forwarding address."

"What's his last name?"

"I don't..." Then he realizes, he does. He heard the name when they called Bruce up to present. "Banner."

"Which school was he from?"

"Harvard," Tony answers reflexively. Then he shakes himself. The mind is a wonderful thing. "Huh."

"Sooo seek out Bruce Banner in the Physics department at Harvard. You said it was Physics, right?"

"Right."

"How hard can it be? You're a genius."

Tony can't help breaking into a pleased little shimmy. "True. Hey. When's your prom?"

"June third," she says, without missing a beat. "Can you fit that into your busy schedule, college boy?"

~

Twenty four hours later, he considers calling Pep to tell her that he found Bruce, but he decides to do something about it first.

Tony waits on a park bench outside Pierce Hall, his foot tapping on the rough concrete as equations and schematics flit through his mind. He left the dorm without taking a book or anything to write with. That was dumb.

"Tony?"

Tony looks up from the blade of grass he'd been unsuccessfully trying to use as a whistle. "Hey. What'd you do?"

Bruce grins sheepishly, lifting a hand with two splinted fingers. "No matter how much you might want to force the issue, doors and appendages will never be friends."

"Ouch."

"Accurate." His grin fading to a curious smile, Bruce looks around. "What are you, attending a seminar here?"

"Nope, I'm playing hooky. I've got my buddy telling the prof I have dysentery. He's tickled pink to be rid of me for the day. I'm the worst lab partner in history."

Bruce looks thrown for a second, but he blinks away his confusion and then just looks amused. "I don't know. I've had some who could compete with you for that."

"Are any of them female? And can they hang? Rhodey needs release like a son of a bitch. That man gets any more pent up, the resulting explosion will take out the lower half of New England. We'd be left with, like, Maine. Who wants that?"

Bruce laughs, the ever-present tension locking up his frame falling away momentarily, and that's all it takes. Tony is gone, irrevocably. Just like the first time Pepper scowled at him and then went suddenly soft, or when Rhodey punched that frat boy from UMass for knocking Tony off his feet.

They made him theirs, and he suspects he'll spend the rest of his life making them regret it. Right now Tony really, really wants to make Bruce his.

~

He isn't surprised when Pepper wants to keep Bruce, too; he can't imagine anyone not wanting to, actually.

She comes up for a week in the early Spring. Officially she's there to interview at the shee-shee business schools in the area and check out what they have to offer, but after Tony graduates at the end of the semester, he's relocating to the epicenter of Stark Industries in LA. He knows that Stanford is her first choice.

It better be, anyway.

"So." Pepper cuts her cheeseburger down the middle and puts half on Tony's already crowded plate. "You're Tony's science buddy."

Bruce puts down his Coke. "One of them, anyway. The newest, maybe?"

"My favorite," Tony says, and he pokes Bruce in the side. "And the robot's favorite. Seriously, Pep. Dummy prefers him to his _creator_. It's so totally unfair."

And then Pepper mentions public transportation to avoid Tony pointing out that Bruce is blushing, and they talk about the T for like half an hour.

~

Tony--well, the Stark estate--has a house on Nantucket. It's a smallish thing, only five bedrooms. His mother had been particularly fond of the place, for reasons he'd never officially pinned down. Probably a present from Howard. Probably had not been offered immediately following her discovery of one fuckup or another. ("I'll tell you something, honey. Try to only give presents to make people happy. Give them something hoping they'll forget they're mad, and all you do is guarantee they'll always remember.")

He convinces Pepper and Bruce to go for the weekend. The first day, they go out on the beach even though the sky is gray and getting grayer. Some kind of bizarre shared stubbornness keeps them there even as the rain starts. Whatever, they have an umbrella.

Slightly woozy from the largest third of a wine bottle, Tony lays his head on Pepper's thigh and lets the rain pelt his shins where the umbrella doesn't cover. "Good day," he mumbles. She leaves her hand high on his chest, just below his collar bone.

"Aaand he's out," Bruce says quietly after few minutes, which of course brings Tony right back from where he'd been drifting.

Pepper hums a little in agreement and starts running her fingers through Tony's hair.

 _Stay down,_ she seems to be saying. Tony doesn't move a muscle.

"Bruce?" she asks. Her voice is steady, Tony notices. Now, he might have only barely passed Psych, but on the nuances of inebriation, he knows more than most. She's had just enough wine to give her the courage to pry. And Bruce has had just enough to inch down his defenses, though not nearly enough to take them down entirely. "How did you break your fingers?"

He takes in a breath that catches. "Don't," he says, growling and pleading at the same time.

"Okay," she says. "It's okay."

It sounds like the furthest thing from okay Tony has ever heard, but he doesn't protest. She says a bunch of other things that barely register, while Bruce doesn't bother trying to lie. His response never mattered. She only asked because she already knew the answer. For once he's completely transparent.

Tony cracks his eyes open. She's got her hand between Bruce's shoulder blades, and he's shaking.

~

Tony's graduation happens five weeks before Pepper's, right around her AP exams, but she manages to get up there for the ceremony anyway. Obie is cool with Tony staying in New York until August, but the hints he's been dropping prove that he really, really wants Tony out there learning the business. ("Seventeen is only a hop, skip, and a jump from twenty-one, m'boy. You're gonna want to know what you're doing when you take over.")

"What are we going to do about Bruce?" Tony asks. He is lying on Pepper's bed and his hands are punctuating his words. "I feel like we should stop dicking around and just kidnap him." He'd complain about Rhodey, too, but Rhodey is far out of his hands and gone. Air Force, what? How does that even make sense.

Pepper throws three balled up pairs of socks snowball-style. They bounce off his chest and shoulder. "Stop it. He likes Harvard," she says.

Tony props himself up on his elbows. "Pepper, no one _likes Harvard_. It's... Harvard."

"You and your well-reasoned arguments." She looks at him, strawberry-blonde bangs framing amused blue eyes and sun-freckled nose, and she's so ridiculously, unbelievably beautiful he pulls her down for immediate defiling.

~

Bruce goes MIA for almost a week right around his twentieth birthday. Later Tony will be ashamed to admit that he doesn't notice anything amiss until Pepper calls from Stanford. "If something were going on with Bruce, you'd tell me, right? It's just that he hasn't been answering his phone for the last few days."

Tony's response is, "Um."

Another three days have passed by the time he hears Bruce's voice on the phone. 

"Brotherman," Tony says. "Where the fuck are you."

"Um, here," Bruce says. "I was about to ring your doorbell, but I realized your house might be too big for you to hear it."

In his mind, Tony is already five paragraphs into a massive telling off for the heart attack Pepper passed on to him. After he opens the door, all the words dissolve unspoken. If forced to describe what he's seeing, Tony would call it a bundle of live wires that just got punched in the stomach.

"Sorry," Bruce says, looking like he isn't certain exactly how or why he ended up where he did. "My, uh, my dad died."

Tony blinks. " _Shit_."

"There was an accident and... cops." Bruce runs his fingers over the nubs of his knuckles over and over. "Can we talk about something else? Please, I- What- what are you working on?"

Tony open his mouth to a few seconds of stumped silence before he manages, "Well, I've got this new concept for an AI."

During the six days Bruce stays in LA (Not nearly long enough in Tony's opinion. But he knows Bruce has a life to get back to in Boston.) he doesn't revisit the subject of his dad once. Tony would say something about that, if he weren't kind of relieved not to have to deal with it.

~

A month before the end of her last semester at Stanford, Pepper accepts an offer from a bank in Kyoto and Tony forgets to answer her calls for two weeks.

"Hey, Pepper told me about the job," Rhodey says from Kuwait. "That's awesome. Yet another one of my friends making way more money than I'll ever see. You celebrated, right? Tell me every detail. Seriously, I have got sand where human beings should not have sand. Let me live vicariously through you for one hot minute."

Tony makes a face, but concocts a sprawling, rambling tale of broken stiletto heels, illegal energy drinks from Mexico, and a DJ adept at mixing disco with Finnish death metal. Five months ago, Rhodey was in a plane that got shot down, and Tony spent three days more terrified than he's ever been in his life. This is the least he can do.

Bruce he almost avoids because he has a feeling he knows what Bruce will say. And that feeling is totally spot on. "What the hell are you doing, Tony?"

Tony frowns at the circuit board and then the phone. "Right this minute? Homing beacons. What are _you_ doing?"

"Drop your homing beacons, get on a plane and go to Palo Alto to apologize to the best thing that's ever happened to you."

"When did you transfer to Stanford?" Tony asks, only mostly kidding.

Bruce sighs. "Stop being a child about this. You know she deserves better."

"Doesn't she though." And there's his excuse to cut Bruce off for a while.

Not too long after, he remembers that he isn't allowed to treat Bruce like that. Bruce is not Pepper and Rhodey. They have the stones to take whatever Tony throws at them and come back for more. They expect it. But Bruce is different.

Still, Bruce hit a little too close to the mark. Tony waits a day before calling and asking for advice.

That's when Bruce tells him about Betty. She's pretty and scatter-brained, self-deprecating and smart. The only downside, her dad is a military hard-ass who sucks all the air out of a room and just loves to throw his weight around.

"I think I met the guy," Tony says. "They call him Thunderbolt, right? Creep City, population one."

"Well, I'm not dating her _dad_."

Tony makes a pained noise. "Thanks for those nightmares."

~

Pepper swears up and down that after a few years she'll have enough leverage to request a transfer to LA, so it's all completely fine. Bruce and Betty finish their degrees and start new ones at Culver University in Virginia, which is horseshit, but they're clearly in love, not only with each other but with the work they're doing, and the last thing Tony wants is to piss on their parade. Rhodey returns from his deployments (plural, because he's insane), and partially to give him something to do that doesn't involve suicide by war, Tony convinces Obie to make him their military liaison.

Obie is, was, continues to be the walking personification of awesome. He doesn't bug Tony about shareholders and that other extraneous crap. Just like when Tony was a kid, Obie basically lets him do his own thing and work his genius-prodigy magic, checking in a couple times to week to make sure he's stocked with enough greasy take-out to keep him going. Tony focuses on his robotics and missile guidance systems and pretty much acts like the board of directors doesn't exist.

Off the clock there are women, and more women, and a man every once in a while. Also booze and, occasionally, a few other things. It's Hollywood. Everything is everywhere.

Rhodey makes a lavish Broadway production of being thoroughly unimpressed.

"Ugh. Stop looking at me like that." Tony covers his face, shielding himself from the twin lasers of disapproval. "You know she's having all sorts of gross, kinky sex out there in Japan."

"Whatever helps you look in the mirror," Rhodey says, and he downs his whisky.

~

When Pepper does return to California, her body has lost every ounce of softness and the look in her eyes is different. Colder. Tony takes full responsibility for that.

Well. Three quarters. Maybe four fifths.

They did agree to see other people. It's just that he knows this isn't what she'd had in mind.

"I missed you?" he offers, sounding so much less sincere than he actually feels. Yesterday's LA Times has pictures of him with two very creative strippers. Anything he has to say would ring false, so why bother?

"Yeah," she says. Her smile is a tight, quick press of lips. "Me, too."

~

When the news arrives (Betty unconscious and battered to holy hell, lab looking like the site of a tornado, all because of one of the test subjects, who's apparently turned into some kind of _monster_ , and Bruce is missing, presumed dead), Tony doesn't keep track of his own movements too well. Somehow both he and Pepper end up at the city park where they used to fool around when she would visit from Stanford. He can't remember who suggested it, but the location makes a lot of sense. It's somewhat neutral territory and it's quiet.

He's not drinking, because even he gets tired of it sometimes, but without the alcohol-haze there's nothing to stop him from dwelling until it threatens to bust him open. "You think he's alive?" he asks in a small voice.

" _Yes_ ," she says, trying for offended, but the way she bursts into tears almost immediately ruins the effect.

"Oh, shit. Pepper, don't do that. Come on. It's okay." Tony takes a second to realize that as much as he hates everyone leaving him, _she came back_. And maybe it's time he started giving a shit about that. "It's okay."

With his arms tight across her back, he can feel her stifling what is probably a frighteningly bitter string of laughter. "Yeah, it's not," she says. "It's really, really not."

He wants to say that it will be, but he isn't dumb, and neither is she.

~

A few days later, Betty recovers enough to call them from the hospital and, oh. _Oh_.

Over the next few weeks, there are about a half a dozen occasions where Tony finds himself with a phone in his hand, ready to dial the number of someone who could put General Ross down permanently. He can't quite bring himself to cross that line.

He can, though, pay a couple of ex-CIA agents very well to keep an eye out for a not-so-jolly green giant and a soft-spoken American with curly black hair.

~

Tony and Pepper settle into something that... well. It isn't like it was before she went to Japan. It's oddly reminiscent of when they were thirteen.

They meet for dinner or brunch or a concert. He makes fun of her silver fox CEO because he knows she has a weakness for distinguished men with gray hair and tons of money. She talks smack about every single piece of art he purchases, until he gives up and just buys whatever she tells him to. Financial wiz that she is, she has built up a sweet little art collection of her own over the years. But she is visibly, tangibly, audibly jealous of his. At times, he can swear there is drooling involved. It's prime teasing material.

"We're besties again," he says, once he's put his finger on it. "That is so weird."

Pepper grins at him from underneath sunglasses and a baseball cap and steals the pickle off his plate. "I'm okay with it."

~

Turns out Tony was stuck in Afghanistan for three months, which is both maddening and mind-blowing. He puts that into context using the three days he thought he was going to vomit after Rhodey was shot down, and the, Jesus Christ, _four years_ that Bruce has been nothing but missed opportunities and reports after the fact.

He wrinkles his nose at his vague reflection in the car window. "People suck, don't they?"

Out of the corner of his eye he can see her nod vigorously while she laughs and dabs at her eyes with a tissue. "I swear to God, I wish I never met you, Tony."

Tony looks down at their entwined hands. She hasn't stopped touching him since they met on the tarmac. "I, uh, really want to kiss you right now, but I'm afraid that would be shitty," Tony says. "Would that be sh-"

Well. That answers his question. He pulls away and nuzzles her jaw, making a soft sound of contentment. "It's possible I dreamed about that a couple times."

"Oh? Did it live up to the hype?"

Tony winces. "See, that is a loaded question. Either you're a bad kisser, or I _dreamed_ you were a bad kisser and..." He waves at her with his good hand. "Why are you letting me go on? We could be kissing _right now_."

She laughs again and complies. Then she says, quietly, against his lips, "No, but, really. You need to go to the hospital."

Tony lets his eyes go wide. "Pepper Potts. Did you just kiss me to make me do what you want? Who _does_ that?" To complete the image of a soul scandalized, he lays his hand over the arc reactor and gasps in horror.

Her response is immediate. "Don't cover it up." She pulls his hand away, then goes strangely tentative when he stares at her. "I- I like the glow."

Okay, that is kind of terrifying. Tony clears his throat, picks up the phone, and tells Happy to drive them to the hospital.

~

So, he and Pepper kill Obie. It doesn't hurt as much as Tony feels like it should.

~

Rhodey doesn't know what to make of him anymore. Weapons were their _thing_. Tony gets it.

Still pisses him off, but he gets it.

"You know what? Let me just build a time machine and fix it so Stane killed Pepper and killed me so you can keep your damn status quo. Because that is the only way. I'm not going back to what I did and what my _company_ did." Tony spreads his arms wide. "Over my dead body. That's it."

Rhodey stands there silent for so long Tony thinks he's pondering where on Tony's face to punch before storming out. But he stays where he is, the frown on his face slowly transitioning from angry to confused and hurt.

"I feel like I don't know this guy," he says, making a hand-wavey motion to indicate Tony.

"I'm still me, Rhodey. I just don't need protecting anymore. I grew up."

Also he thinks he's in love.

Pepper takes a leave of absence from the bank to help sort out the massive power vacuum at Stark Industries. It's a bit irregular (and a total conflict of interest since they're doing the sex again). But 1) Tony is suffering manfully through some pretty severe trust issues at the moment, and 2) while Tony may not want this spread around, he has _no fucking idea_ how to run a multinational corporation.

When he starts getting sick from the palladium, with no conceivable way out, the only thing that seems to make sense is handing the company over to her.

~

For much of the three days following the rumble at Stark Expo, he and Pepper exist in the form of a platonic tangle of limbs on his bed. He knows that sex won't help her forget that he never told her he was dying, so he isn't pushing it.

Although he does actually really want sex.

Justin Hammer's annoying fucking yammer stays in his head, keeping his brain from shutting down when he tries to sleep. At least Rhodey's happy, happier. Tony teases that he should have given the guy a suit six months ago and avoided all the sturm und drang, but he'd like to think there's more to Rhodey's change of heart than that.

Coulson's smug face shows up on his phone. "Afternoon. How are you feeling? Less poisoned?"

Tony pinches the bridge of his nose. "Isn't there some kind of, I don't know, grace period in between obligations? Can you not leave me alone for _ten seconds_? I mean, just because my tech is way too advanced to allow your crappy spybots to keep tabs on me twenty four-seven, you think you can-"

"Bruce Banner," Coulson says. Then he smirks. "Mm, I thought that would shut you up."

Tony's first official act as SHIELD consultant is to personally nudge General Thunderbolt Ross a few inches closer to that inevitable and, God willing, fatal coronary. That helps take the sting out of knowing he and Pep flew out of New York only hours before Bruce got there.

~

As he arrives on the Helicarrier, Tony walks past the table where Rogers and the others are sitting to find Bruce off to the side and talk degrees Kelvin and heavy ion fusion like everything is normal. That lasts about sixty seconds before they both fall silent and Bruce goes, "Um. Hi."

Tony's glares daggers at Bruce's offered hand until Bruce withdraws it, curling into himself tight.

"Six years?" Tony demands. "Really. _That_ was necessary."

Bruce glances over at the table, where everyone occupies a different part of the scale between staring outright and blatantly pretending the two of them don't exist. "Tony, can we-"

" _Yeah_?"

Bruce exhales loudly. He looks old and tired. He's regained the when's-someone-gonna-hit-me twitchiness he outgrew twenty years ago.

Pepper is going to murder him with her bare hands, and Tony is going to sit back and eat nachos while it happens. "You about ready to come in from the cold yet? Huh, Banner?"

"Get the feeling you two know each other," Rogers says, so dry the words practically blow away as they're being spoken, and amusement cuts through the anger and overwhelming relief of finally having Bruce close enough to shake until his teeth rattle. Tony snorts. 

Captain America has snark. Who knew?

 _No, no, no, no,_ he tells himself as he grabs the back of Bruce's neck and guides him over to sit at the table with the grownups like an actual member of the group. _Oh, no. You are not taking on another one._


End file.
